Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/58

Rh in earnest King of France; Charles regain his old dukedom of Burgundy; the Constable should govern Provence and Bourbonnais as a sovereign prince. So three claimants should be satisfied, and France exist no more.

To such a pass the enmity of Louisa and his own furious anger had driven the Constable. He had of late had much to suffer. The King had publicly insulted him at table; his generalship was taken from him; his estates were to be handed to another. But at present Bourbon endured in silence, waiting for an expedient to leave Paris almost in battle array.

Let us hear how it struck a contemporary. "And my said Lord of Bourbon," writes the Bourgeois of Paris, "on Friday, the 27th of March of the said year 1522, left Paris, by the King's leave, to go through Brie and towards Provence; and he took with him all the archers and all the crossbowmen of Paris, in order to take five or six hundred evil livers and bandits which did much harm in the flat country there. And many of them were hung. And thence he went into his own land of Bourbonnais.

"In the said year 1523, Friday the 11th of September, news was brought to Paris by Réné, the Lyons' messenger, that Monsieur de Bourbon had left the land of France; and on Our Lady's day in September had departed in secret from his land of Bourbonnais; and by the sound of trumpet he was proclaimed a traitor throughout the land of France; and it was proclaimed that whoso should take the said Lord of Bourbon and deliver him into the hands of the said Grand Master, my Lord Alençon, or into the hands of M. de la Palisse, the King would grant him 10,000 golden